NY Times: Pentagon …

NY Times: Pentagon Plans a Computer System That Would Peek at Personal Data of Americans. This makes me wonder if I should start thinking about getting a fake identity, regardless of how illegal it might be. I have fake online identities I use all the time, since it is easy to be anonymous. If corporations can create fake shelter companies to hide their losses and cheat on their taxes, then citizens should be able to do the same thing. It’s silly logic, but it’s how I feel sometimes.

Think about it this way. For things like grocery shopping, e-commerce, and other seemingly harmless activities I could use my alternate identity without fearing that I am giving away too much personal information. And for things like taxes, business communication, and airplane tickets I could use my real identity since it makes more sense. The problem with the Pentagon’s plan is instead of becoming smarter about the intelligence and information they already have, they are opting to just gather more intelligence. No matter what they do, there will be ways around the safeguards they have put in place. Fake indentities can be bought in any large city for a couple hundred bucks. I fail to see how implementing a system that simply gathers more data is going to prevent terrorism, and this leads me to think that the Pentagon has a hidden agenda the American public does not yet know about.

Macromedia Contribute: The public beta version has been released today, Windows only. I’ve been told the Mac OS X version should be out in early 2003.

A List Apart: This is an great article that show you exactly how to make your Flash embed markup standards-compliant. Excellent work! Unfortunately, making it standards-compliant means you have to wave goodbye to supporting Netscape 4.x browsers. Ah well, maybe that is for the best.

Newsfactor: Developer’s Dilemma: Perl or PHP?

Femme Fatale: Please do not see this movie. I repeat, please refrain from seeing this movie unless you like laughing out loud at a movie that is supposed to be suspenseful. Brian De Palma should be ashamed for making such crap and foisting it on the American movie-going public. This movie has forever ruined Ravel’s Bolero for me, a song beautifully introduced to many people through the great love scene in “10” with Dudley Moore and Bo Derek.

Spinsanity: Making Bush tell the truth. [via dangerousmeta]

UIWeb.com: Best of CHI-WEB & SIGIA-L. I think I’ve linked to this before but it’s worth repeating. If you (like me) don’t have time to read all the threads on CHI-WEB and SIGIA-L, this is a collection of all the best posts with links directly to each archived posting. Excellent!

Craigslist: Christian Gun Owner Seeks Young Man to Help Around House. I can’t tell if this is a joke. I don’t think it is.

Federal Computer Week: Open-source code rife at DOD. “But what if open-source software applications and development were banned in DOD?”

Posted by Cameron Barrett at November 11, 2002 05:11 PM

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